FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT JAMES FRANCO - PAGE 2

The death of James Dean in a car crash in 1955 turned the brooding 24-year-old movie star into a tragic legend, and a symbol of alienation and hurt among teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s. But while other icons of the era, like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, have been grist for a steady stream of novels, biographies and movies, Dean has been surprisingly ignored, especially in films. It's not for a lack of trying. For years filmmakers have toyed with projects about James Dean but were locked in a Catch-22: Studios would only finance the movie with a star, or at least a name actor.

To quote the immortal Mr. Hand of Fast Times at Ridgemont High: "What are you people? On dope?" Yes, indeed, Mr. Hand. "Stoner movies" - the grandmother of which was 1936's Reefer Madness, the PSA-melodrama about the evils of the "devil weed with roots in hell" - are full of people gone to pot. But according to Pineapple Express star James Franco, the true classics need to "transcend by uniqueness" the mere ingestion of hallucinogens. Here are Franco's five favorite fired-up features: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Director Gus Van Sant plays it straight, so to speak, with Milk, a biopic based on the short career of Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor who in 1977 became the first openly gay man elected to a major public office. Aside from a brief, stylized montage of an activist phone-tree that recalls the old FabergM-i shampoo commercials ("and they told two friends"), em style="u">Milk somberly unfolds. It seems like the right choice. Van Sant works from a script by Dustin Lance Black to tell Milk's story clearly and forcefully.

ON NBC Freaks & Geeks Plot: It's 1980 and high school class warfare rages. The freaks -- Daniel, Nick and Ken -- are dopesters and screwups, who get all the girls. The geeks -- Sam, Neal and Bill -- are the brains and sci-fi nerds, who are social outcasts. The thread that begins to bind them is Sam's older sister Lindsay, who falls for Daniel. Joe Flaherty steals every scene as the father of Sam and Lindsay, who knows someone who has died from just about every act of human behavior. Stars: John Daley, Samm Levine, James Franco, Busy Phillips, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Seth Rogen, Joe Flaherty, Becky Ann Baker Airs: 8 p.m. Saturdays on WTVJ-Ch.